A serial entrepreneur having founded multiple start-up companies, including

one of the first profitable Internet enterprises. Eric V. Holtzclaw is the

Founder/CEO of Laddering

Works, a marketing strategy firm.

He has spent 20+ years creating opportunity by identifying and capitalizing

on emerging trends and disruptions to business. His professional experience

includes: founding multiple successful start-up companies, including one of the

first profitable Internet enterprises, and serving as the strategic lead in the

implementation of dozens of products and services worldwide. His last company

appeared on the Inc. 5000 list three years in a row.

In summary you could say Eric advises clients on the

“whys” of business:

Why customers buy,

Why teams work and

The all-important “entrepreneurial why”. Eric’s new book is Laddering:

Unlocking the Potential of Consumer Behavior.

What sets apart the The Challenger Sales Reps? Who so happen to be the most successful sales reps.

In the book, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation author Matt Dixon points out are six attribute that showed them statistically significant in defining someone as a Challenger rep:

Offers the customer unique perspectives

Has strong two-way communication skills

Knows the individual customer s value drivers

Can identify economic drivers of the customers business

Is comfortable discussing money

Can pressure the customer

Matt Dixon, an executive director of strategic research at CEB, has an unrelenting drive to find the answers to questions senior executives often take for granted. For more than 15 years, Matt has worked to uncover the truth behind many pillars of conventional wisdom in sales and customer service, often overturning long-held assumptions that are costing companies dearly in terms of wasted money and lost market opportunity.

Matt was my podcast guest last week, Need Customers, Create an Effortless Experience, where we discussed his latest book, The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty. This podcast will get you up to speed on the latest thoughts on one of the most significant sales book written in the past several years.

My Thoughts about The Challenger Sale: Lean Salespeople are Challengers, not Problem Solvers

Lean Engagement Team

Marketing with Lean Book Series

How much of your business innovation focuses on ease of use versus

being on the cutting edge? How much of Apple’s success was a result of making

things simpler to use versus being innovated? Few Apple products were first to

market; they usually were 3rd or 4th to market. However, they always excelled at

USE or as Matt Dixon’s new book is titled, The

Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer

Loyalty.

Matt Dixon, an executive director of strategic research at CEB, has an unrelenting drive to find the answers to questions

senior executives often take for granted. For more than 15 years, Matt has

worked to uncover the truth behind many pillars of conventional wisdom in sales

and customer service, often overturning long-held assumptions that are costing

companies dearly in terms of wasted money and lost market opportunity.

I started the podcast and engaged Matt Dixon about his book, The

Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation but found his

new book equally as fascinating. Get ready because Matt is such a fast talker

that in these podcast he says more than the average podcast that is typically

twice as long. So much information and so quickly that I decided to split the

podcast in half with this one concentrating on The Effortless

Experience.

Dr. John Terninko has integrated his diverse experience base (electrical engineering, operations research, organizational development, teaching, continuing education and management consultation) to develop a unique intervention style for organizations. He has been teaching and using TRIZ for 13 years. Consistent with his professional life of being on the cutting edge in QFD and Taguchi for 23 and 27 years, respectively, John has integrated TRIZ, QFD and Taguchi in his approach to design problems.

I can honestly say that John’s Step-by-Step QFD: Customer-Driven Product Design, Second Edition book, besides being on Amazon.com's top 50 Management book list, is the “raggiest” book on my bookshelf. His Systematic Innovation: An Introduction to TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) (APICS Series on Resource Management) is being used by universities and industry for training. John has been advocating getting out of the office and seeing customer for over thirty years. It was my honor to have him on the podcast. Lean Sales and Marketing: Learn about using CAP-Do

Marketing with Lean Book Series

Dr. Joey Faucette (@drjoey) is the internationally known author of the #1 Amazon best-seller, Work Positive in a Negative World: Redefine Your Reality and Achieve Your Business Dreams. He is the founder of Listen to Life, a business coaching company that helps owners, leaders, sales professionals, managers, and others to achieve their business dreams primarily through his coaching programs, “7 Weeks to Work Positive” and “The Work Positive Master Coaching Program.” He is also the founder of the Positive Media Network, a fully customizable online streaming music marketing tool (described in podcast).

Dr. Joey’s specialties include broadening outcomes, collaborative team building, increasing productivity and lowering turnover. He is an exceptional speaker and was a great podcast guest. Hint: He makes it sound easy!

Nir Eyal distilled years of research, consulting and practical experience to write Hooked: A Guide to Building Habit-Forming Products. He founded and sold two technology companies and taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. His writing appears in the HBR, The Atlantic, TechCrunch, and Psychology Today.

An excerpt from the podcast:

Joe Dager: How does this blend with Lean startup?

Nir Eyal: That’s a great question. So I’m a big fan of Lean StartupTM, and I think that what I seek to do in my processes is to help makers overcome what I struggled with. And that was that of the three phases of the Lean startup, the three steps as proposed by Eric Ries, of build, measure, learn, the hardest phase, the place where all the blood, sweat, tears, and of course all the money went, was the building phase. That’s the hard part. So my work really fits hand and glove because it seeks to help product makers identify what they should build. A few years ago what we should build was determined by the highest paid person in the room. And then if you’re really progressive today, you’ve heard the Lean startup methodology, and you listen to customers – the customer development and hearing what customers want.

I think there’s actually a deeper layer that there’s things that people want that they’re not able to articulate and yet predictably will guide their behavior even if it they can’t tell you they want it. I believe by looking at consumer psychology, by looking at these tenants, these design patterns of habit-forming products, we can build the right thing sooner. We can reduce waste by informing which of our many features we build. The entire point of the hook model is to plug in to the build, measure, learn methodology. To have a little bit of a framework, to have these four steps to ask yourself if your product requires habits, does it have these four steps and how can you brainstorm new features based on where you might be lacking. So the book is really meant to be super practical. I give these, “Here’s what you do.” I call these little sections at the end of each chapter, “Do this now,” to help product makers literally with the next step. And it’s all about creating ideas for new features. What else can do to your product to make it more habit-forming? But it all still has to fit into the Lean Startup methodology of building, measure, learn.

Linda Richardson new book,Changing

the Sales Conversation: Connect, Collaborate, and Close is one of the few

sales books that I have read that puts an emphasis from a Service Dominant Perspective (SD-Logic) versus selling from a

Good Dominant Logic (GD-Logic) position. It is the new sales conversation that

had to happen.

Linda is the Founder and Executive Chairwoman of Richardson, a global sales

training business. As a recognized leader in the industry, she has won the

coveted Stevie Award for Lifetime Achievement in Sales Excellence for 2006 and

in 2007 she was identified by Training Industry, Inc. as one of the “Top 20 Most

Influential Training Professionals.”

Linda is credited with the movement to Consultative Selling, captured in the

book Perfect

Selling, which is the cornerstone of Richardson’s methodology. Other

innovations Linda has spearheaded in the sales training industry are:

development of a comprehensive, integrated curriculum dedicated exclusively to

sales, commitment to customization vs. generic training, and development of an

interactive coaching-type training methodology.Lean Sales and Marketing: Learn about using CAP-Do

This Business901 podcast is a two-part series with Adam Zak, founder and CEO

of Adam Zak Executive Search. He is

an accomplished senior executive with more than 25 years of experience spanning

the areas of management, consulting, financial and operations management and

talent acquisition. He co-authored the book, Simple

Excellence: Organizing and Aligning the Management Team in a Lean

Transformation detailing the role of senior management in achieving a

successful transformation to organizational excellence.

Adam is considered by many to be the most influential leader today in Lean

Recruiting and Lean Executive Search. I invited Adam to discuss a few of his

secrets on learning about people and engaging them in meaningful dialogue about

themselves. Adam has conducted over 3,000 interviews in his career and knows a

thing or two about people. Lean

Thinking on Value Enhancement eBook is the transcription with the podcast

link where Adam appeared previously on the Business901 podcast.

This is Part 2 of 2 of the Secrets on Learning about People by

Adam Zak.   

This is Part 1 of 2 of the Secrets on Learning about People by

Adam Zak.Discover the Why before learning the How of Mapping

Marketing with Lean Book Series

This Business901 podcast is a two-part series with Adam Zak, founder and CEO

of Adam Zak Executive Search. He is

an accomplished senior executive with more than 25 years of experience spanning

the areas of management, consulting, financial and operations management and

talent acquisition. He co-authored the book, Simple

Excellence: Organizing and Aligning the Management Team in a Lean

Transformation detailing the role of senior management in achieving a

successful transformation to organizational excellence.

Adam is considered by many to be the most influential leader today in Lean

Recruiting and Lean Executive Search. I invited Adam to discuss a few of his

secrets on learning about people and engaging them in meaningful dialogue about

themselves. Adam has conducted over 3,000 interviews in his career and knows a

thing or two about people. Lean

Thinking on Value Enhancement eBook is the transcription with the podcast

link where Adam appeared previously on the Business901 podcast.

This is Part 1 of 2 of the Secrets on Learning about People by

Adam Zak.

TRIZ is an acronym. T-R-I-Z. It’s a Russian Acronym for theory of inventive

problem solving. And don’t worry about the word “theory” because, in fact, TRIZ

is a whole bunch of very practical methods for creative problem solving – Ellen

Domb

Is TRIZ something you can use? Find out in this podcast. Ellen Domb is a TRIZ

expert, co-author of the book, Simplified

TRIZ: New Problem Solving Applications for Engineers and Manufacturing

Professionals, Second Edition, and founder of the PQR Group, a TRIZ

training & consulting. Besides the book, they offer a good way to start 

TRIZ through their e-learning platform (http://www.trizpqrgroup.com/e-learning.php).